Introduction

Virtual reality (VR) has since long been considered an auspicious technology for education, promising a way to explore foreign places and environments that the students would otherwise not have access to (Pantelidis 1993) and to ‘create a compelling sense of being there, of presence or immersion’ (Psotka 1995: 407). As shown in recent literature reviews, this emphasis on spatial experience, immersion, and engagement is dominating also more current research on VR and 360° videos in education (Di Natale et al. 2020; Paulsen et al. 2024; Pirker and Dengel 2021; Rosendahl and Wagner 2024; Shadiev, Yan and Huang 2021; Snelson and Hsu 2020). The implementation of VR in education thus follows a historical trajectory in which audiovisual technologies are imagined as having the capacity to ‘bring the world into the classroom’ (Good 2019: 101) and of educational technology as fundamentally transforming and improving education (e.g., Cuban and Jandrić 2015; Selwyn 2011).

In response to this simplified narrative and ‘digital hype’ (Selwyn and Jandrić 2020) where educational technologies (EdTech) are understood as ready-to-be-implemented solutions to pedagogical problems, postdigital scholars have emphasized the relation between teachers, learners, and technology as co-constitutive and ‘part of the complex human and non-human relations that co-constitute teaching and learning, in ways that resist and defy both the purposes built-in to the technical design, as well as any “aims and objectives” that we might have as teachers or learners’ (Jandrić and Knox 2022: 783). This applies not only to the enactment of digital technologies in learning situations but also to the design and development of EdTech that is not only driven by global EdTech corporations but also by local communities and non-profit actors (Macgilchrist et al. 2024).

To understand this complexity and the role of educators and students in the construction of digital technologies in education, this paper draws on a postdigital perspective to describe and explore the hands-on development of a VR technology used for museum visits in a Swedish municipality, Inclubit-360. More specifically, it discusses how the imaginaries surrounding VR, as being immersive and engaging, are negotiated through workarounds and local configurations. These workarounds are intuitively performed by students, teachers, and other educational professionals such as IT coaches and museum teachers in a co-constructive process including human actors, technologies, and learning spaces.

The article follows this outline: the first section introduces the theoretical framework and previous research used to understand the imaginaries surrounding VR and how these visions of immersiveness often stand in contrast to the tangible presence of the technology itself. This is followed by a description of the case study and the methodological approach informed by visual ethnography. The analysis of the material unfolds in three sections presenting the articulation work performed to (1) make the technology work in the local setting, (2) facilitate interaction and communication, and (3) produce presence. In the last section, these results and the contribution are discussed in relation to the research on imaginaries in education, postdigital education, and critical EdTech studies.

Virtual Reality Imaginaries

It is not only in education that new technologies are imagined as having the capacity to connect the user to the outside world and create a sense of presence. In their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, Bolter and Gruisin (1999) propose that the development of all new media is driven by a strive for immediacy, the ability to create a sense of direct, unmediated experience for the user. Through strategies such as interactivity, simulation, and integration, new media technologies strive to provide users with a heightened sense of presence and engagement, blurring the boundaries between the user and the digital environment. The clearest example of this logic, they suggest, is virtual reality which ‘has become a cultural metaphor for the ideal of perfect mediation’ (161). However, as ‘a medium whose purpose is to disappear’, VR is challenged by the technical gadgets it requires, from headsets to charging stations and software, that constantly reminds the user of the medium itself (Bolter and Grusin 1999: 21–11).

Although Bolter and Grusin published their theories on remediation almost 25 years ago, the messiness of VR still applies, and later research shows a gap between the tech industry imaginaries of an everyday technology and user experiences of VR. In their study about the discursive framing of the VR suite Oculus, Egliston and Cater (2022) show how Facebook’s vision of VR as a ‘normalised part of people’s everyday lives, receding into the background of everyday life’ (11) is not shared by users of this emerging technology. For them, the technology is often very visible and not always functioning as expected. At the same time, users’ understanding of what VR should be—a seamless technology that enables immersion and presence—is shaped by industry narratives, which as sometimes also reproduced by users (Lucia et al. 2023). VR is thus not a finished product that might or might not correspond with the needs of user groups but rather something that is constructed in the meeting between different narratives. This is demonstrated by Nagy and Turner (2019) in their study in how VR is articulated in the meeting between developers, marketing, salespersons, and users and becomes embedded in existing social and cultural practices.

The negotiations and work required to align the efforts of different actors and make emerging technologies fit with established practices have been thoroughly theorized in Technology and Science Studies (STS). Such articulation work (Strauss 1985) includes the often-invisible work to repair, service, and configure technologies in order to ‘gets things back “on track” in the face of the unexpected’ (Star and Strauss 1999: 10). In technology production, the articulation work taking place among users is often kept separate from the professional development and design which obscures the fact that the outcomes or consequences of technology are distributed among various actors (Suchman 1995, 2002).

In an educational context, this means that although most technologies for classroom use are developed by big-tech companies outside the school, it is always enacted by teachers, students, and parents in a socio-material process of mutual shaping. To understand this process, postdigital and critical EdTech scholars have turned attention to the local and material aspects of digital technology, including the human labor involved in producing and making technologies work (Knox 2019; Mörtsell 2023; Selwyn et al. 2017) and the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways in which this and other relations are played out in the postdigital classroom (Lamb 2023; Macgilchrist 2021).

Others have focused especially on technology development and the co-designing of educational technologies that take into account the realities of everyday teaching. Collaborations between teachers and software developers can be used to challenge dominant narratives and ‘solutionist framings’ of educational technology development but are not goals in themselves (Macgilchrist et al. 2024:5). On the contrary, two recent studies about the co-designing of educational software show that these projects might benefit actors from the digital economy rather than participating schools or teachers that contribute with their time and knowledge for free (Sperling et al. 2024; Cress and Kalthoff 2023). Actors from the tech industry do not only benefit from school digitalization by utilizing the knowledge of teachers but also through processes of datafication in which students become producers of data that is collected and used for commercial purposes (Jarke and Breiter 2019; Lupton and Williamson 2017). Mapping how these technologies are tested and implemented in schools is important not only to reveal the ongoing exploration of students and teachers but also to understand the manual labor involved in the development and enactment of digital technologies.

Another growing strand of research has attended to the sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff 2015) underpinning emerging digital technologies in education, often characterized by a tech-optimistic solutionism where the introduction of new technologies in education is seen as a part of societal transformation (Forsman et al. 2023; Rahm 2023; Rensfeldt and Player-Koro 2020) as well as enhancing the learning of individual students (Hrastinski et al. 2019; Tafdrup 2020; Williamson 2018). Some studies within this area have focused on the tensions and negotiations taking place when global sociotechnical imaginaries are translated into local contexts, thus stressing the co-productive elements in future technological development (Lucia et al. 2023; Mager and Katzenbach 2021) ‘where improvisation and maintenance are ongoingly emergent’ (Pink et al. 2018: 200).

This study contributes to these lines of research by exploring a case of local EdTech development that both enacts and challenges corporate imaginaries about VR in education and what it could be and by highlighting the role of students, teachers, and other educational professionals in this process.

A Visual Ethnography of Virtual Museum Visits

The case study described here is a municipal pilot project where a combination of VR and 360° cameras was used to facilitate virtual museum visits. The software that was used, Inclubit-360, was developed in collaboration between the local IT developers in the municipal school district and a state-funded research institute in Sweden. The project initially started with the aim to help students, who for some reason did not attend school, to participate in lessons via VR and eventually make their way back to the classroom. The idea was to place a 360° camera in the classroom and connect it to a VR headset, thereby making it possible for absent students to visit the class without having to leave their homes.

The requirements given to the research institute developer from the municipal project leader were that ‘it should be as close to real time interaction as possible’, that the software should be open source, and that no data should be stored to protect student integrity. To avoid delay in the streaming, the developer decided to design the software interface as a webpage using Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC), which is an open-source technology that enables real-time communication via web browsers. A first version of Inclubit-360 was developed and tested on a small population of students.

After finishing this first pilot project, the initiators decided to try the software for another purpose, namely, field visits for school classes, which is the case this study focus on. This second round of development meant expanding from a 1:1 use where one VR headset is connected to one 360° camera to a solution where several headsets could be connected to the same camera. The camera was placed at the venue of the field trip (in this case, a world culture heritage museum and a science center), while the students were all present in the same classroom wearing VR headsets (Oculus Quest 2) that streamed directly from the camera. The spaces were also connected via a Teams meeting on a separate computer in each place to facilitate setup and communication outside the VR environment during the sessions. As the software was under development, it was continuously modified throughout the project, along with the setup of cameras, computers, and other hardware in each setting.

The project entailed four visits in total, two to a museum on world culture heritage (one with students from compulsory school and one with high school students from a vocational nurse training program) and two to a science center (one with students from compulsory school and one with high school for students with intellectual disabilities). We participated in three of these visits, as shown in the table below (Table 1). One of the initiators of the project, along with another municipal IT developer and a guide/teacher, was present at the museum and the science center, while in the schools, it was the class teacher together with one or two IT coaches and the students (and in visit 1 also a journalist from a local newspaper documenting the event).

Table 1 Field visits and participants
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Prior to the visits, we had a longer interview with the developer team (the municipal IT developer and state research center developer) and two interviews with one of the museum teachers (from the museum of world cultural heritage). We also participated in the online meetings where the teachers, developers, and museum teachers met to discuss the setup and theme of the visit. During the observations, we participated in the on-site preparations, the broadcasting session, and a short debriefing afterwards with the participants. The visits were also followed up with individual online interviews with the teachers (2), technicians (developers and school IT coaches) (3), and museum teachers (1) involved in the project. All participants have been anonymized and have given their permission to participate in the study. However, since the name of the product Inclubit-360 is used (in consultation with the developers) and the participating museums are possible to identify based on the images and the descriptions, it is still possible to locate the material geographically, and all interviewed participants have been invited to read and approved the use of the material before publication.

The visits were documented using methods from visual ethnography (Pink 2021) such as photography and video, along with sound recordings of the interviews and on-site conversations. Compared to traditional ethnography that primarily relies on textual descriptions to understand and interpret cultural phenomena, this approach highlights the importance of including also visual material. This entails both already existing images and visual material that is created as part of the research. In the case of emerging technologies, Pink et al. (2018) suggest that it is often through commercial images that users encounter dominant industry narratives about technological futures.

In VR, such future visualizations typically include ‘the upturned face of someone wearing a headset’, with their ‘[m]outh open, it is as if these people (typically men) see something awe-inspiring, something profound’ (Harley 2024: 2162). In contrast to these images, visual documentation can be used to bring forth mundane and often invisible actions that participants perform to make technologies fit with their needs but that they perhaps do not reflect upon verbally in conversations or interviews. This makes visual ethnography well suited to explore the gap between big tech imaginaries and everyday experiences, ‘a critical practice capable of revealing the narratives and flaws in visions of futures driven by narratives of technological innovation and financial capital’ that ‘creates visual counterpoints to how futures are visualized’ (Pink 2021: 120).

In an educational context, this aligns with the call for postdigital sensibility that ‘starts from the position that digital technologies are established within our everyday surroundings and practices’ (Lamb 2023: 115–116) and recognizes the analog and material dimensions of digital educational technologies (Jandrić et al. 2018; Knox 2019). These two approaches have informed the analysis of the material in which the photographic images, videos, and transcribed sound recordings are analyzed together, focusing especially on how articulation work is performed in practice and how this can be read as negotiations of dominating imaginaries.

Co-constructing Immediacy

Starting out as a technology to help students with school anxiety to spend time in their home classrooms, the project described here is of course very different from the mainstream imaginary of VR in education as enabling students to visit far-away places and awe-inspiring environments. Also, in the second iteration of Inclubit-360, the aim was to facilitate visit to museums and science centers located in the same region as the schools. The participating teachers had previously traveled to these places with their students and was thus something that would have been possible to do also without the VR technology.

However, despite the somewhat mundane nature of these sites, the purpose of the visits aligned with a central trope in VR imaginaries, namely, that of immediacy (Bolter and Grusin 1999) and ‘being there’. The participating teachers and technicians motivate their interest in the project as a chance to experience an environment outside the classroom without having to pay entrance fees and train tickets (that the schools can no longer afford, at least not on a regular basis). This is especially important from an accessibility perspective, explains the museum teacher, since the state-funded museums should be available for everyone to visit, not only students in schools in the big city areas of Sweden where most museums are located.

The participants also see future potential in the technology when it comes to visiting environments that are less accessible, such as cultural sites abroad or work-life situations. This is not only a matter of accessibility explains one of the teachers, working in a vocational school specialized in healthcare. In line with research discussing the pedagogical potential of VR and 360° cameras in healthcare education (Davidsen et al. 2022; Shadiev, Yan and Huang 2021), she also suggests that these technologies can provide opportunities to make the student experience stressful situations that they seldom encounter in their in-service training:

It would be very interesting for them to be able to participate live, perhaps when caring for someone who is seriously ill. /…/ Healthcare students also need to learn acute care… it is hard to learn with a doll or fake blood. (Teacher, vocational high school).

Although the participants see a lot of potential in VR for educational purposes, these hopes are reserved for the future, whereas the technology in its present for is viewed more as an experiment than something that can be used in schools on a daily basis. The museum teacher jokingly says that he was glad the initiative came from the municipal and not from the museum ‘so that I am not the one taking up three whole days of planning for a 15-min visit’. One of the technicians further suggests that the students were onboard because they understood that this was a unique event but adds that ‘if it was an everyday technology, the demands would have been very different’. The work being put into the visits can thus partly be explained by the fact that it was a pilot project where the technology was under development, which all the participants were aware of. It further reflects the paradoxical nature of emerging technologies as both fulfilling and contesting the imaginaries surrounding them. In the following, three kinds of articulation work involved in this process are described: hands-on repair and maintenance work, facilitating interaction, and the creation of presence through different techniques.

Preparations, Maintenance, and Repair

The planning of the VR visits started long in advance and included online meetings, e-mails, and physical visits. The participating museums and science centers were contacted via email by the municipal developer for the project and the teachers via local ICT coaches at the school or through an internal web channel for schools in the municipality. The persons involved in each visit then met online to discuss the setup of the visit and later settled the details via email. Since the visits were shorter than ordinary (about 20 min compared to 1 h for an on-site visit), the content needed to be more condensed and was therefore tailored for each class to fit the teacher’s lesson plan. The technicians visited the museum and science center in advance to plan the setup of the 360° cameras and how the guide should move in the space. They also went to the participating schools to instruct the students on how to use the VR headsets and to let them familiarize themselves with the VR interface (one visit to the high schools and vocational schools and three visits to the school for pupils with intellectual disabilities).

On the day of the VR visit, the persons who were supposed to be at the museum or science center gathered there one to two hours in advance to set up the technology and check that the connection was working (see Fig. 1). In the schools, 1–2 technicians were present before the session started. They were responsible for bringing the VR headsets to school and make sure they were charged and that the classroom was furnished appropriately. They further assisted the teacher with maintenance work during the session by helping students to log in and find the right channel, attending especially to those students who missed the first training session and had never used VR before. This work also included the exchange of malfunctioning headsets and to take care of students who removed their headsets due to dizziness or because they got lost in the interface. Before the session started, the technicians set up an online meeting to establish a connection outside the VR environment. This meeting became a central node for the ongoing articulation work, as it was through this channel the participants synchronized their preparations and decided when to start the visit.

Fig. 1
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Setting up the museum space with 360° cameras and online meeting. Photograph: Ingrid Forsler (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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The online meeting was also used to communicate about errors that occurred during the visit despite the meticulous preparations. In the first session, the connection was broken during the presentation which was reported via the Teams meeting as the only functioning channel. The breakdown meant that the students and classroom teacher had to log out of the 360° environment and back in again, which took 8 min of the session that lasted for 32 min in total. In the second session, the place was darker than expected and the footage from the camera came out blurry. One of the technicians recalls how this was solved on the spot, ‘somewhat provisionally’ by using a smartphone flashlight to light up the scene (see Fig. 2). In the third session, the sound stopped working due to a recent software update which meant that the start of the tour was delayed. Whereas other things, such as malfunctioning devices, can be covered for in advance, these breakdowns in connection and lightning conditions are harder to predict and ‘we had to build the plain while flying’ as one of the technicians put it. At the same time, they considered it ‘valuable knowledge’ that can be used to inform future visits and the further development of the software.

Fig. 2
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Using smartphone flashlight to improve lightning conditions. Photograph: Michael Forsman (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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It was not only the teachers and technicians who performed repair but also the students took the initiative to enable a smoother experience. One student on the first visit was disturbed by the light coming in from underneath the headset and went to the bathroom to get some tissue paper that she used to seal the gap between her nose and the headset to prevent light from getting in and disturbing the image (see Fig. 3). The same student experienced difficulties with the hand controllers that she found too large and difficult to hold on to. The adjustment of the ill-fitting devices took a lot of time and focus from the visit and the student reflected on it afterwards as an example of the standardization of technology:

The controls are a bit large, they are made for man-sized hands... and I feel like, should we really create things just for men? /…/ Same with the headset, it is not made for small noses. Made by men, for men. (Student, 18 years).

Fig. 3
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Student repairing VR headset with tissue paper. Photograph: Ingrid Forsler (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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This critical approach to the technology was mainly manifested among the older students in visit one, who were 18 years old at the time of the visit, whereas the younger students in the other visits discussed their experiences afterwards more from the perspective of users. The teachers and technicians, in turn, brought up another material aspect of the VR technology, namely, who should be responsible for purchasing, storing, and keeping the headsets updated if they were to use it regularly. At the time of the visits, some sets of VR helmets were available for loan in the municipality, but according to one participant, there is no real system in place to borrow them. Instead, loans are arranged more on an interpersonal and informal level which is yet another aspect of the human labor involved in making this technology function.

Facilitating Interaction

In addition to the articulation work performed to get things back ‘on track’ (Star and Strauss 1999: 10), the participants also configured the technology and environments to fulfill some of the dominant imaginaries of VR, such as interactivity. One of the motivations behind the project was to not only access environments outside the home or classroom but also be able to interact with these environments and the persons in it in real time. The problem was that the two spaces were not connected in equal terms since the person wearing the VR headset could see, listen, and talk but not communicate using their body language and the person in the space where the 360° camera is located could hear the persons using the VR headsets (via headphones) but not see them. This was an issue already in the first iteration of Inclubit-360 for students with school anxiety, recalls one of the developers. He explains that while the person at home might get a sense of being there, the students in the classroom cannot see where or what the person at home is looking at ‘which makes it really hard to establish a relationship’.

This issue was experienced also by the museum teacher who found it difficult to know who he was talking to or if the students were paying attention since he could not see them. The students could in turn not communicate with the guide by raising their hand as they were used to from the classroom context. This led to an insecurity in the situation, and during one of the visits, one student reputedly asked, ‘Can they see us?’ to which one of the technicians finally replies, ‘Yes, but very, very, small’. The software had a built-in function to raise an electronic hand, similar to that in online meeting software, but to access this function, the students had to exit the stream and go back to a virtual waiting room which few of them chose to do. The developers plan to integrate the raise-hand function in the stream view in the future but also addressed the problem in a more hands-on way during the pilot.

In the first session, the museum teacher could not see the students at all but only communicate via sound. This worked out since it was a small group with only two older students (18 years) and one teacher participating. The second and third visits were performed with full classes and younger students (13–15 years), and the team decided that it would be too noisy to let them keep their microphones on. Instead, they started a second Teams meeting displaying the students in the classroom (and not the technicians as in the other meeting) and ran that on a separate computer (see Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
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Screen setup to facilitate interaction between museum teacher and students. Photograph: Ingrid Forsler (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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This screen was placed on a table close to the guide, although not close enough to be visible in the stream. This meant the image was still too small for the guide to see the students faces or if they raised their hands but was still something to focus on while speaking. In the second session, the screen was located next to the guide, but this was adjusted in the later sessions to make the virtual audience positioned more in front of him/her. In addition to the screen being too small to interact with the students, it also had to be moved along with the museum teacher as he/she walked through the exhibition space, and the technicians discussed that a possible development would be to use a bigger screen with wheels in future sessions.

Due to this limitation, sound became the main mode of interaction in all sessions but especially in the first one where the museum teacher could not see the students at all and when they kept their microphones on during the whole visit. The museum teacher interacted with the students by asking short questions to which they replied. The students, in turn, compensated for the lack of physical interaction by constantly making small sounds like ‘aha’ and ‘mmm’. After the session, they explained that this was to signal to the guide that they were paying attention to what he was talking about, but that they would have preferred to ‘keep up with the conversation without having to constantly say yes and interrupt’. One of the students developed the difference between interacting through body language and why she felt the responsibility to let the museum teacher know she was there and listening:

You are used to being able to interact, to nod and agree, and I think that is a nice thing to do. In this case, he can’t see us and he doesn’t know if I just sit and stare or looks completely uninterested but when someone sees you, it’s different, then you want to show that you’re interested in what he’s talking about. (Student, 18 years).

The vocational study program the student was enrolled in included a lot of in-service training at hospitals and other healthcare facilities. In the discussion after the visit, the student explained that this experience from having professional experiences with adults meant that she was used to take social responsibility and that is why she reflected on the importance of signaling to the museum guide that she was present and interested in the topic. The younger students in visits two and three did not reflect on this practice, but performed it intuitively by answering the guide questions best they could, even when they had difficulties hearing what the guide said.

The importance of sound was also addressed by the museum teacher already in the beginning of the tour, when he said ‘I can’t see you very well but I hear you so the sound will be very important’. He further reflected on doing this kind of ‘onboarding’ in a more systematic way in future visits, by for example asking the students to wave if they can see and hear him properly. However, this would only be to compensate for a lack of relationality that in other cases includes not only the humans present in the museum but also the room and the objects in this space. ‘This is what a museum can offer’ he explains, ‘the spatiality and feeling of being present’. The nature of this presence and how it was constructed in a collaboration between different actors is discussed in the last section.

Creating Presence

A recurring motivation to do regular field trips among the teachers in the study was because it offered the students a different kind of experience than everyday classroom teaching. This experience is not limited to the current exhibition at a museum or science center but also includes the travel to get there, being in a bigger city, exploring the building of and interacting with other people in this space. These aspects of what it means to be present in a cultural institution are however not easily translated into VR, and two out of three sessions we participated in were performed outside regular opening hours to ensure a quiet broadcasting environment.

The third session, in the science center, was supposed to take place before opening hours, but due to a rescheduling at the center, it was performed with other visitors in place at the museum, most notably a group of preschool children. Their loud interaction with the surrounding environment made it difficult for the students participating via VR to hear what the guide said and to concentrate on the tour. According to the teacher in the classroom, it also seemed as though the guide had difficulties hearing what the students said and there was very little communication taking place. What is otherwise considered ‘the essence of a museum’, as one of the guides put it, namely, to meet and interact with other people, here becomes a problem that needs to be removed to facilitate the feeling of presence.

Paradoxically, the idea of being present in one place also meant paying more attention to the environment in which you are physically present than you would in ordinary teaching (c.f. Lucia et al. 2023). To begin with, the VR headsets as such were a very tangible aspect of the experience for the participating students who found them heavy and that in some cases caused dizziness. The room in which the visits took place was also very central for the experience, and the municipal project initiator emphasized the importance of not having too much furniture and to keep the students sitting down to not stumble and hurt themselves during the session. In one of the pre-visits to schools, the participants discovered that the best way to move around in the VR space was by using an office chair with wheels. The classrooms used in the pilot were however furnished with ordinary chairs, without wheels. In the first session, with fewer students, the teacher in charge therefore borrowed the teachers’ chairs with wheels from the surrounding classrooms to facilitate for the students to move around smoothly in the exhibition space (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 5
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Setting up the classroom with moving office chairs. Photograph: Ingrid Forsler (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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In the other two sessions, there were more students and not enough chairs with wheels on in the school. In these cases, the students compensated by moving the static chairs around in circles, prioritizing the ability to look around in the VR space over the screeching noise caused by 20 chairs being pushed around the classroom floor (see Fig. 6).

Fig. 6
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Students pushing chairs in circles to explore the VR space. Photograph: Ingrid Forsler (CC BY 4.0 DEED)

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To further create a sense of presence, a lot of care was put into the choice of places and the interaction with the 360° environment and the objects within it. In the science center, they chose to place one camera in a shark tunnel since this was an environment that can be explored from several angels, and, in both locations, the museum teacher brought objects that they showed to the camera and built their presentation around. The movement from one place to another was also crucial but, similar to the presence of other people, not as part of experiencing the place as it would have been on site but as an element of disruption in which the technology reminds the user of its presence (c.f. Bolter and Grusin 1999).

In the first visit, only one 360° camera was used which then had to be moved manually between the rooms. To prevent the students from becoming dizzy and to maintain their sense of presence, the museum teacher asked the student to close their eyes when they moved the camera. When the camera had arrived at the new location and they opened their eyes, he oriented them in the space again by saying: ‘We have not moved far but I am now in a room shaped like a circle’. Of course, the students never closed their eyes but ‘wanted to see what it felt like when the camera moved’ and consequently felt a bit ill due to the sudden movement.

In the visits that followed, two cameras were used to avoid this movement, but the students had to exit the VR environment to switch to another camera, which also interrupted their feeling of presence. This will be adjusted in future versions of the software to enable the user to swish between cameras in the 360° environment. As previously mentioned, one of the aims with the project was to inform such further development of the software, but the improvised low-tech solutions that were performed to solve technical dilemmas during the project are also interesting in their own right. It highlights the manual work that goes into the development, implementation, and use of educational technologies that are not always functioning as expected. It further shows a shared responsibility for making things work that goes beyond the role of testing and instead points to an understanding of educational technology development as a co-productive, creative, and somewhat messy process. As summoned by one of the teachers taking part in the project: ‘Everyone involved needs to take the time and to engage in it, otherwise it won’t work’.

Discussion

This study answers to the call within postdigital theory and critical EdTech studies for a fine-grained and empirically grounded understanding of the everyday messiness of educational technologies, in education as well as in design and development (e.g., Knox 2019; Selwyn et al. 2017; Macgilchrist et al. 2024). Within research on postdigital education, it is often stressed that agency is distributed between humans and non-humans and that educational technologies can be seen neither as finished solutions leading to certain ends or as neutral tools that the teacher can use to achieve desired results (Jandrić et al. 2018; Jandrić and Knox 2022; Macgilchrist 2021). The results of this study contribute to this field by focusing on two aspects of the socio-material relation in which technologies come into being: human labor and the spatial dimension.

As noted by the editors of a recent special issue on the design of postdigital futures, the distributed nature of agency in design processes does not mean that the relation is equal and that ‘no matter how distributed agency is, humans have responsibility for design decisions’ (Macgilchrist et al. 2024: 6). In addition to the fact that there are people behind all technologies used in the classroom and that their interests and biases are built into the design, this study points to another imbalance between humans and non-humans, namely, that humans are the ones responsible for the work needed to make technologies fit and to fulfill their promises. Although both humans and non-humans can act in unpredictable ways and material configurations are at the heart of handling such contingencies, the workarounds and configuration performed to do so are always initiated by humans.

Spanning from hands-on repair to a restructuring of the learning situation to compensate for the lack of being present in the same room, these configurations are described here as different kinds of articulation work (Star and Strauss 1999; Strauss 1985). What distinguishes the articulation work performed in this project from corporate technology production is that, in this case, it is not kept separate from the site of production but an integral part of the development process (c.f. Suchman 2002). Previous studies report on other types of inequality in co-design projects that relies on the unpaid work of teachers and ‘point to a clear imbalance of power in favor of the actors from the digital economy’ (Cress and Kalthoff 2023: 425). This kind of imbalance is not as apparent here, even though only the developers had the opportunity to modify the software. The local nature of the project positioned teachers and students as creators rather than just testers of technology, and the practical issues that arose were considered important outcomes by all parties involved.

The second aspect that becomes visible in this study is how learning spaces are part of the relation in which educational technologies are enacted. As shown by Lamb (2023), a postdigital approach to education means recognizing that digital technologies are already an intergraded part of the physical classroom and that researchers interested in role of technologies in education need to pay attention to the mutual shaping of spaces, technologies, and practices. This study shows that this applies also to emerging technologies that, although not yet established, plays an important role in the reconfiguration of learning spaces. The introduction of a new digital technology is here enabled not mainly through configurations in the digital infrastructure but through traditional classroom furnishing and attention to the physical movement within the space. It also involved ancient communication techniques such as the use of voice and analog repair practices such as the use of tissue paper to seal the VR helmet.

This interplay between the digital, analog, and ancient technologies in this process underscores what is often repeated in postdigital theory, namely, that physical and the digital realms are not separate entities but deeply intertwined in the fabric of educational experiences (Jandrić et al. 2018; Knox 2019; Lamb 2023). Visual ethnography has been useful for disentangling these relationships and analyzing how different elements in this process shift between visibility and invisibility, both for me as a researcher and for the participants. During the observations, the practice of photographing mundane environments and practices turned attention to the analog aspects of the digital and made them easier to discuss with the participants (c.f. Pink 2021). Also in the analysis of the material, the photographs acted as helpful reminders of the different elements involved in the articulation work of making the VR setup work.

The study also resonates with research on the corporate imaginaries and promises surrounding educational technology (e.g., Forsman et al. 2023; Hrastinski et al. 2019; Rahm 2023; Rensfeldt and Player-Koro 2020; Tafdrup 2020; Williamson 2018). In the case of VR, these promises include immediacy, a removal of the medium itself, which according to Bolter and Grusin (1999) is a strive that characterizes the development of all new media. However, as highlighted in this case, the VR software did not inherently achieve these ideals but instead required a collective effort from the participant, reflecting Illich’s (1973) idea of ‘convivial tools’ that necessitate active human engagement and cooperation to realize their potential benefits.

This role of human actors is less developed in the remediation theory, and Bolter and Grusin are criticized by Gitelman (2006:9) for omitting ‘any mention of human agents, as if media were naturally the way they are, without authors, designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, programmers, investors, owners, or audiences’. By focusing on the role of different human actors in the co-constructive process of educational technology development, this study addresses this blind spot in remediation theory while at the same time drawing on its notion of technological agency where digital devices tend to obstruct the feeling of unmediated experience though their material presence. This paradox is thoroughly discussed in remediation theory, which makes it a suitable approach to explore not only the labor performed by humans to make technology work but also their role in the reproduction and negotiation of imaginaries surrounding these technologies.

The analysis of this aspect in the material confirms the state described in previous research on VR of a gap between the way VR is envisioned by the commercial EdTech industry and the experiences of participants after trying it out in an everyday context (Egliston and Carter 2022; Harley 2024; Lucia et al. 2023; Nagy and Turner 2019). On the one hand, the participants describe the objectives for initiating and participating in the project using established narratives of VR as having the capacity to overcome distance, visit foreign or inaccessible places, create a feeling of presence, and boost student engagement. On the other hand, they recognize the messiness and the working hours put into the project (see also Paulsen et al. 2024; Pirker and Dengel 2021). This included both the meticulous planning and preparation before the visits and technical support needed during the event, which makes it difficult to scale up the project or use it on an everyday basis. The potential the participants see in VR for educational purposes is thus seen as a future promise rather than something attainable today. As one participant puts it, ‘the future lies ahead of us, but the future is not yet here’.

Conclusions

As discussed above, the results of the study resonate with postdigital research that problematize the technical determinism and instrumentalism that underpins much of the debate around EdTech by suggesting that educational technologies are not finished solutions but locally co-constructed by teachers, students, developers, and IT coaches. At the same time, the participants’ understanding, use, and configuration of the technology are to a large extent shaped by global imaginaries emanating from the EdTech industry of VR as creating a sense of ‘being there’. Put differently, the participants endorsed the industry imaginary of VR as an immersive technology but disputed the narrative of VR as a new everyday technology. This should not be read as a dichotomy between corporate imaginaries and ‘reality’ but rather as co-constitutive relation in which the global imaginary about VR is both shaping and being reshaped by the users’ experiences with the technology.

There is a tension between these two aspects, the desire for immediacy and being present in another space else and the work that goes into fulfilling these imaginaries, often by manually interacting with the space you are physically located in, in this case, a classroom, museum, or science center. This positions teachers, students, and other educational professionals in the role of creators rather than just testers of technology and stresses the situated, embodied, and contingent aspects of technology development.

The local and non-profit nature of the project described here further contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the EdTech sector as being more than just ‘big tech’. Rather, it can be seen as a continuum of initiatives, ranging from one-product projects driven by individual teachers or local municipalities to the development of comprehensive digital infrastructures by state actors or global tech companies. At some point, however, all technologies will be configured and negotiated to fit the local conditions which point to the need for local EdTech production that takes these expiries into account from start.

However, even considering the rapid development of VR technology, none of the persons involved in the pilot believes that it will be used to any large extent in education, but that it will function more as an addition or alternative to existing practices and teaching materials. If the pilot project had not been seen as an interesting experience and an opportunity for the students to become familiar with technologies that they might encounter in the future, it would probably have been more challenging to find participants to the pilot study because of the amount of time needed to make it work. This suggests that the demands for cost-effectiveness in education might clash with the need for locally developed and co-designed educational technology.